


take me anywhere

by wentz



Category: NCT (Band), WayV (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Office, Bottom Suh Youngho | Johnny, M/M, Mirror Sex, New Year's Eve, Quarter-Life Crisis, Strangers to Lovers, Top Qian Kun
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-04
Updated: 2020-01-04
Packaged: 2021-02-27 07:28:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22113367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wentz/pseuds/wentz
Summary: Johnny scowls. It’s all soboringthat it makes his dick want to retract back into his body like a telescope.At least it’s New Year’s. Maybe someone will get sloppy enough to kiss someone they shouldn’t at midnight.He looks down at his glass and reaches for the champagne decanter. A couple more heavy pours and maybe it’ll be him.
Relationships: Suh Youngho | Johnny/Qian Kun
Comments: 59
Kudos: 438





	take me anywhere

**Author's Note:**

> there is a light that never goes out. kun is the light
> 
> thank you as always to mina !!!!
> 
> warnings for alcohol use but everything depicted is keyword: use not abuse
> 
> this work has now been translated into russian!!

_" 'Get down,' you shout, but they continue their transaction, deer transfixed by headlights. 'There's no time!' But your warning remains unheeded._

_"And so then, just before the front windows become a crinkled, liquefied imploding sheet—the surface of a swimming pool during a high dive, as seen from below—_

_"—And just before you're pelleted by a hail of gum and magazines—_

_"—And just before the fat man is lifted off his feet, hung in suspended animation and bursts into flames while the liquefied ceiling lifts and drips upward—_

_"Just before all of this, your best friend cranes his neck, lurches over to where you lie, and kisses you on the mouth, after which he says to you, 'There. I've always wanted to do that.'_

_"And that's that. In the silent rush of hot wind, like the opening of a trillion oven doors that you've been imagining since you were six, it's all over: kind of scary, kind of sexy, and tainted by regret. A lot like life, wouldn't you say?"_

* * *

The party is—well, a party. An _adult_ party, that is—nothing like the college parties and, fuck, even _high school_ parties that Johnny’s been to. 

Don’t go to parties in high school. You’ll just end up throwing up. Always. Every time.

It’s not that Johnny doesn’t _like_ adult parties. They definitely hold advantage over non-adult parties in many, many aspects. For example, no one throws up or gets inappropriately drunk and you almost _never_ walk into your room to grab a textbook you promised to lend your classmate and stumble upon your best friend fucking someone you’ve never even met before in _your_ bed, fuck you very much, Ten.

Yeah. Adult parties have their merits.

On the other hand… they’re kind of… how do you say… 

Boring.

They used to be fun! Truly, Johnny genuinely enjoyed himself at adult parties when he first graduated and got his Big Boy Job in a real-life marketing department of a real-life company. It was so _nice_ to be taken seriously for what felt like the first time in his life, like the first time he was invited to sit at the Grown Up Table at Thanksgiving instead of eating his turkey and stuffing hunched over a TV tray. But somewhere along the way, the adult party lost its magical sheen and just became…

Johnny sighs, sips his cheap champagne (not even the fun, trashy kind of cheap champagne; this is middle-of-the-road cheap, the kind of cheap champagne bought by people who pour it into a decanter for fear of a snotty coworker seeing the label and raising their eyebrows), and pushes himself off the doorsill from which he’s been observing the minglers in the living room. Maybe there are still some of those little baguette toasts in the kitchen.

He side-steps a duo talking, like, seriously _right_ in the middle of the doorway to the kitchen. They stop long enough to give him close-lipped smiles and then go right back to talking about work. Johnny wonders idly what the point of adult parties are if everyone just carries on talking about work regardless of the fact that _hello,_ they’re supposed to be on _holiday_.

The tray that once held the eensy baguette toasts now only bears crumbs and a few errant smears of olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Johnny glances over each shoulder to make sure no one is watching before he picks one of the abandoned tomato chunks off the tray and sucks it off his fingers.

That’s one thing Johnny kinda misses about college parties. Gone are the days of sitting on the kitchen floor shoving pooh bear scoops of dry cereal into your mouth straight from the box while one of the people who actually lives in the apartment makes a pot of macaroni and cheese. Now it’s all _hors d'oeuvres_ , a word that Johnny could say but never knew how to spell until his first e-invite to an _adult Christmas party._

There’s another thing. He misses using Christmas as an excuse to drag all of his favorite people into one room and shower them with sort-of-shitty-but-still-thoughtful joke gifts. Adult Christmas parties are, like… mulled wine (which is kind of cool but also kind of weird but also kind of good?) and non-ironic sweaters and absolutely no gifts, joke or otherwise, and couples.

Johnny scowls, plowing a fancy cracker into the dish of tapenade and shoving it gracelessly into his mouth. God, always with the _couples_ at adult parties. Sitting close (but not too close!) on the couch and holding hands and laughing, always in tandem and always politely. It’s so _boring_ that it makes Johnny’s dick want to retract back into his body like a telescope.

At least it’s New Year’s. Maybe someone will get sloppy enough to kiss someone they shouldn’t at midnight.

He looks down at his glass and reaches for the champagne decanter. A couple more heavy pours and maybe it’ll be him.

“Oh my _god_! Donghyuck, I didn’t think you’d make it!”

Johnny’s armpits go cold and sweaty. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. _Maybe it’s a different Donghyuck,_ he thinks wildly. _It’s a pretty common name in the US, right? Yeah, Donghyuck is, like, basically John Doe._

“I thought it would be a shame to not at least pop in. Now that my work study is over I don’t know when I’ll get another chance to see everyone!”

God, he’s so fucked. Oh, God. Johnny starts frantically looking for an escape route that won’t put him directly in the path of the intern he’d fucked in the out-of-order gender neutral bathroom last month when Johnny _thought_ he would never see the kid again.

‘Kid.’ Johnny needs to calm down. The kid—fuck, the _guy_ —is twenty-one years old. Definitely _not_ a kid—and he didn’t fuck like a kid, either.

He hears someone mention something about getting Donghyuck a drink and the panic-sweat under his arms redoubles. He grabs a handful of fancy crackers for the road and skirts out through the back door at a speed that would leave behind puffs of smoke in a Looney Tune.

It’s cold as _balls_ outside, so cold in contrast to the humid atmosphere of the crowded party that it takes Johnny’s breath away at first contact and makes his chest hurt when he gasps for air. His hands reflexively ball up and it takes a concentrated effort to relax his fist so he doesn’t crush all of his crackers into salty dust. He’s not above licking cracker crumbs off his sweaty palm and that’s exactly why he needs to keep them relatively whole. Thank god he’s already kinda tipsy-warm from the champagne; all bubbly and fizzy and—

A man leans against the porch railing. He glances over his shoulder at Johnny before moving to tamp out his cigarette with the guilty speed of someone caught with their hand in the cookie jar.

“You’re good,” Johnny says quickly. “Don’t waste it, I don’t care.”

His porch-companion flashes him a grateful look. “I never know, y’know? And I hate it when people from the office see me smoking and look at me like I’ve got one foot on a banana peel and the other in the grave.”

Johnny laughs at that, because literally what the fuck, and shuffles over to stand next to his porch-companion, with whom he has just decided to make friends because, literally, what the fuck. “Can’t say I’ve heard that one before.”

The guy chuckles a little bit and Johnny thinks he might be blushing—either that or his cheeks are just chapped from the cold. Six one way, half dozen the other. Either way, Johnny thinks it’s cute. “I, uh— I actually got it from the title of a documentary on the AIDs crisis I saw once but, I mean, I think it’s also a colloquialism.”

He blinks. “Dude,” Johnny mutters. “That is— a heavy lead-in.” Fuck, he’s being rude. Backtrack, backtrack— “I mean, not that I don’t understand that it’s an important part of our history that shouldn’t be ignored or swept under the rug—”

Cigarette Guy cuts himself off halfway through a drag to ask, “You’re gay?” He sounds surprised but not necessarily the _bad_ surprised that people can sound when they say _You’re gay?_

“You’re not?” Johnny shoot back, equally surprised. He shoves another cracker into his _big fucking mouth_ in hopes it will shut him up.

His porch-companion smiles. “No, I am. I just— You’re not really… I don’t know, I just never pegged you as, you know—”

“A raging homo,” Johnny fills in. Oh, fuck. He’s too drunk to filter himself but not drunk enough to not be embarrassed at the absolute bullshit coming out of his mouth. “Sorry—”

The other man laughs and this time it’s a _real_ laugh, not just a breathy huff or some shit, and it’s low and giggly like a little baby laugh, and Johnny wants to yeet himself over the porch railing and into the trees edging the fenceless yard. “No, no, it’s okay,” he giggles—giggles! “Please, don’t apologise. It’s the first time anyone’s said something with any kind of personality to me all night.”

“Fuck,” Johnny sighs. “Fucking— I know, right?” He licks his lips to warm them up from the stinging cold even though he knows it’ll just make them chapped later. Whatever, he got that bougie lip balm in his Christmas stocking. “Like, I swear to god if one more person tries to, like, subtly edge their thinly veiled political statement into our casual small talk I’m gonna destroy the whole world with my mind.”

That earns another bubbly little laugh from Smoking Guy, tripping out past those pink, cold-nipped lips in a chain of tiny puffs of smoke. “Almost makes you miss the days when going to a party meant drinking trashcan punch until you lost all sense of object permanence and whoever was in your direct line of sight automatically became your best friend in the entire world.”

Johnny’s lips twitch upwards into a smile of his own. He slips another cracker into his mouth. The salt makes his lips sting. “Are you, like, a magical genie or something? Are you gonna disappear at midnight and I’ll spend the rest of my days mystified and wistful?”

Smoking Hot Guy’s eyebrow furrows, dipping low so the mole just above his eyelid moves. “What?”

“You’re just, like— It’s _too_ convenient that I stumbled upon you like this with you all, you know, smoky and mysterious and beautiful and reading my mind and stuff.”

Instead of laughing again, he hums, ashing his cigarette over the porch railing. “If I was a magical genie, do you really think I’d give myself away that easily?”

Johnny’s heart thumps suspiciously hard in his chest. He turns, angling his body to fully face Manic Pixie Cigarette Boy. “Do you want to get out of here?” He shakes his head, immediately realising how that sounds. “Not as in, like, do you want to go have sex somewhere—” _Not that I would say_ no _to going and having sex somewhere,_ his brain interjects. “—but as in, this party is the worst and I’m scared of getting older and losing my personality and I’m ready to get out of the rut I’ve been in for the past year and a half and I think meeting you might be the perfect excuse to do just that.”

Something happens, then, on the other man’s face. It starts as the slightest narrowing of his eyes and slowly, slowly, blossoms open into a smile entirely different from the wry, twisted things Johnny has seen from him thus far: something a little bit wild, a little bit thrilled, a little bit I-can’t-fucking-believe-this-guy.

“I’m Kun,” he says by way of answer, scrubbing out his cig on the rail in a streak of black and dropping the butt into his empty champagne glass.

It reminds Johnny of his own champagne, which he promptly throws back and drains in one go. His ears burn at the way Kun raises his eyebrows, amused. “I’m Johnny,” he replies.

Kun tilts his head towards the porch stairs, smile shifting into a smirk. “Lead the way, Ben Braddock.”

* * *

The spontaneous atmosphere flags after they climb into Kun’s car and have to stop in order to, you know, figure out where they’re running away to. Kun’s bent over his phone, probably google searching ‘things to do near me’ to find an event to crash.

Johnny doesn’t know what to do with his hands. They fiddle with his seat belt, audition resting on the lip of the door, and pick imaginary lint off his jacket before finally falling useless in his lap.

His stomach growls, loud in the empty quiet of the dormant car. He puts a hand on his stomach and glances over at Kun. The other man, to his credit, keeps his eyes on his phone but Johnny catches the tiny twitch at the corner of his mouth. “Oh my god,” he mutters. “Sorry.”

Kun shakes his head, allowing the hidden smile to spread across his face. “I wasn’t gonna say anything.” He locks his phone and starts the car. “Y’wanna go to, like, Taco Bell or something? Get some brain food? What’s your drunk food of choice?” he asks, already pulling out of his parallel park.

Johnny cringes. “Ugh. Krystal.”

Now it’s Kun’s turn to say, “Oh my god.” He stares at Johnny as though he just admitted to Kun that he eats baby burritos for breakfast every morning. “Who hurt you? Like seriously, who subjected you to that in the first place and who psychologically damaged you so much that _that_ is the beacon of grease to which you crawl on your last drunken leg?”

“It’s not that bad!” Johnny insists, voice going high in defense even as he starts to laugh, half at Kun’s dramatics and half in relief at the ice finally breaking. “It’s better than, I dunno, McDonald’s.”

“It’s not better than _McDonald’s_. McDonald’s is basic bitch drunk food but it’s never not been there when you need her.” Kun shakes his head and flings his aux cord at Johnny in disgust. “I can’t believe you’re my only option for DJ. How am I supposed to trust your taste in _anything_ now that I know you get into bed with that soggy excuse for a fast food hamburger?”

Johnny rolls his eyes and plugs his phone into Kun’s sound system. “Well, at least you can never accuse me of being elitist.”

They end up going to Taco Bell. Kun orders a cheesy gordita crunch and _two_ seven layer burritos, which Johnny finds a little extravagant until he sees Kun fucking destroy that shit in five minutes flat, barely pausing long enough to lube up the tortillas with diablo sauce before sliding it down his throat like a fucking anaconda.

It’s much easier now that Kun has broken the politeness seal _and_ the propriety-of-a-sophisticated-adult seal, what with the personal attack on Johnny’s choice of fast food followed by the Taco Bell deep throat. It’s _easy_. They make jabs and laugh at each other in the same way Johnny used to tease his own friends before the Winds of Adulthood blew them all to jobs in different corners of the world. Johnny didn’t even realise he was missing this kind of comradery until he clicked into place alongside this stranger in the driver’s seat.

After they blaze through the drive thru on two wheels, Kun drives them to a neighborhood park because, in his words, late night tipsy TBell is best digested in a deserted parking lot. Johnny is a little worried about how easily he could be murdered and his body abandoned in the drainage ditch but he’s equally worried about a cop pulling into the parking lot to arrest them for public indecency and, upon finding them both publicly decent, arresting them for loitering instead.

“I work in accounting on the floor above you,” Kun says with more than a hint of reprimand. “I can’t believe you’ve never seen me before.”

Johnny can’t figure out a normal way to say that he spends most of his days at work in a sort of glazed-over autopilot mode through which he fails to notice much beyond the square footage of his miserable little cubicle and the ancient Keurig in the break room, so instead he says, “Marketing and accounting are, like, sworn rivals at the company picnics so I probably wrote you off as Competition: To Be Crushed.”

Kun licks a dollop of refried beans off his thumb, smirking. “So you don’t fraternise with the enemy?”

“I mean…” Johnny coughs a little. “I could be persuaded to fraternise a little. Probably.”

“Mhm. Real iron will you’ve got there, Mr Team Spirit.”

“Whatever. Shut up.” Johnny takes a big sip of Baja Blast and wishes he had some vodka or something to spike it with to sustain the buzz that’s starting to fade. “Anyways, you can’t get pissed at me for never noticing you when you never said anything to me.”

“Fair.” Kun drinks half of his own Baja Blast in one go, smacks his lips thoughtfully, and climbs out of the car.

Johnny chokes on his tiny quesadilla and opens his own door to call after Kun. “Where the fuck are you going?” he demands, only borderline frantic at the suddenly erratic behavior of the stranger he has lowkey trusted with his life.

Kun gestures towards the playground equipment. “I wanna swing.”

Jesus Christ. Johnny stumbles in his haste to get out of the car and follow him. Maybe Kun was lying when he said he was sober enough to drive.

By the time he catches up, Kun is standing— _standing_ —in one of the swings on one foot, holding onto both chains and watching Johnny jog up with an odd smile.

“Fucker,” Johnny pants. “What are you doing?”

“Come on, too grown up to swing?” Kun shifts his weight so the swing starts to sway back and forth. “You were the one who wanted to go all _Garden State_ on everyone’s asses.”

Johnny looks at Kun for a moment, really takes him in full— well, not _full frontal_ , that’s not the right term, but it’s the only one Johnny’s champagne-addled brain can come up with right now. His grin and his white dress shirt glint in the distant orange light from the park gazebo; the rest of him sort of shifts in and out of the shadows of the park behind him.

“Does that make me Zach Braff?” he asks, stepping around Kun to help him get going with a few good pushes. “I don’t know if I wanna be Zach Braff.”

“Well, I’m definitely Natalie Portman, so that just leaves Zach Braff or Peter Sarsgaard.”

Johnny frowns. “I thought that was Jennifer Garner.”

“No, dude, it’s Natalie Portman.”

“No way. She would’ve been busy with Star Wars.”

Kun cranes his head, wobbling in the swing as it changes his balance. “I don’t know what to tell you, man. It was Natalie Portman. She was, like, one of the first textbook manic pixie dream girls.” He turns back around. “I mean, if you wanna get technical, Audrey Hepburn was probably the _first_ first when she played Holly Golightly but that was before the general public realised that women were people.”

Johnny grabs the adjacent swing with both hands and squints at it with one eye, trying to focus enough to get one foot into the saddle. “Women are people?”

His swinging partner’s head whips around so fast that Johnny’s brain supplies its own Indiana Jones whip-crack sound effect for it. “Excuse me?”

He smiles, finally convincing his foot to meet the swing and bearing his weight down into the stirrup. “Kidding.”

They swing in companionable silence for awhile. Johnny breathes the cold into his lungs. Kun seems fixated on the sky; maybe looking for the stars that the city’s light pollution snuffed out.

“Tomorrow’s my birthday,” he says.

Johnny hums. “The first?”

“Yeah.” Kun leans his weight against one of the swing’s chains, making his trajectory go cockeyed. “My mom used to tell me all the fireworks and celebrations were for me. The whole world was celebrating my birthday, on every channel of television and even on the radio.” His voice floats, dreamy. Johnny would close his eyes if it wouldn’t make him motion sick. “Talk about disillusionment.”

Johnny really, really wants to hold Kun’s hand. But that would be weird, right?

“Let’s do something.”

Kun laughs. “Am I finally gonna get the adventure I was promised?”

God, embarrassing. Johnny wishes for a little of the liquid courage he’d found on the porch. “I don’t know about adventure. But we should go to a party. A real party. With, like, dancing and music and liquor and— stuff.”

“And stuff?”

“Fuck, yeah.” He goes to step down out of the swing—dangerous at his level of tipsiness—and narrowly avoids faceplanting. Kun laughs at him again and it makes his ears feel sparkly. “And stuff. I’m at just the right amount of drunk and reckless to do cocaine or something like that. If you want, I mean.”

The other man hops out of the swing with much more grace than Johnny. “I don’t really want to do coke,” he teases. “But I like to dance.”

“Let’s dance, then.” Johnny smiles, breathless. “It’s not your birthday without a party.”

* * *

It’s sweltering in the club. Of course it is; seems like half of the LGBTQ population of the city is on the dance floor grinding to Whitney Houston. They left their jackets in Kun’s car because Kun bitched about paying for the coat check but even without it Johnny can feel his shirt sticking to his armpits and the small of his back after a few minutes muscled into the line of people at the bar all vying for the bartender’s attention (somehow the bartenders _still_ look bored, even on the busiest night of the year. Johnny’s starting to wonder if that’s, like, a gay club _thing_ ).

Johnny’s not sure exactly when but it probably happens somewhere between him bringing Kun’s whiskey coke to their hard-won table; the double round of shots Kun brought back after his trip to the bathroom; Kun circling clever, slender fingers around his wrist and dragging him onto the dance floor; subsequently losing Kun in the disorienting crush of dancers; and now, Kun miraculously reappearing in front of him again with sweat pearling at his hairline and his carefully styled hair ruffled into something wilder, looser either from Kun’s hands or, fuck, someone else’s, or countless someone elses’ running through it. 

Somewhere in the midst of this whirl of light and color and sound and bodies, whether on purpose or by accident, the top three buttons of Kun’s shirt come undone and leave a truly devastating amount of skin bare for the strobing lasers to dapple green, red, magenta, blue. He wears a necklace that Johnny failed to notice before; a thin, pretty chain that clings to the sharp outward jut of Kun’s collarbones.

This doesn’t make sense, but—Johnny wants to _lick_ it. He wants to find out how that shape _tastes_.

Kun moves like sin. Johnny feels clunky and conspicuously drunk in comparison to the way Kun dances in front of him, insinuating himself into Johnny’s space with each step. It takes Kun taking Johnny’s hands into his own to guide them towards his hips and flashing him a look, eyelids low and alluring but the eyes themselves antithetically _amused_ just below, for them to finally, finally touch.

The spell breaks, or maybe it’s finally cast, or maybe Johnny’s just really, really drunk and vaguely, amorphously horny. Regardless:

He flexes his fingers around Kun’s waist, instinctively adjusting his grip so his thumbs press into Kun’s hipbones, and then slides his hands around so the tips of his fingers reach each of the curves of Kun’s asscheeks. Asscheeks—not a sexy word, Johnny’s aware, but Kun’s _asscheeks_. Wow. He gives his twin handfuls of Kun’s hips an experimental squeeze and can’t help the way his pulse leaps into his ears when Kun bites his lip and stutter-steps closer in the tiny space they’ve carved out for themselves on the dance floor.

“I like your hair like this,” Johnny says for the sake of saying something. Now that he has permission to touch, he combs the tips of his fingers through the sweat-damp crest of white-blond falling over Kun’s forehead, pulling it out to watch it change colors with the dance floor lights. “You’re like a sexy Draco Malfoy.”

Kun laughs. Johnny loves it when Kun does that. “Draco Malfoy _was_ sexy.”

“Yeah, but you’re sexier.” Dumb, dumb, dumb, god, Johnny is so _dumb_.

Thankfully, Kun has mercy on him and doesn’t respond beyond a quirking at the corner of his mouth that Johnny has seen a few times now but still can’t wrap his head around. His hands wind around Johnny’s neck, pulling him closer so they dance cheek to cheek. Johnny turns his nose towards the soft hair at Kun’s temple and thinks he might understand what Louis and Ella were talking about when they sang _right up in heaven, I’m in heaven, and my heart beats so I can hardly speak._

Kun doesn’t leave to dance with anyone else for the rest of the night. Johnny knows for two reasons:

1) He’s getting pretty familiar with the way Kun’s body moves against his own and he _likes_ it. Even when he closes his eyes and slip-slides in and out of sync he can tell it’s Kun pressing back against him, keeping him from being lost at sea in the lights and people and noise and alcohol.

2) When the music cuts out and the DJ shouts something that Johnny’s whirling brain can’t quite catch and the entire club starts counting down from ten, Johnny opens his eyes and forgets to count because all he can see is _Kun_ : Kun’s profile, thrown into relief by the lights; the sweat rolling from Kun’s hairline down the nape of his neck to disappear below his collar and gather in the dips of his collarbones; Kun’s lips shaping the sounds that shape the words that mean the numbers; Kun’s eyes, bright, brighter than bright as he looks over the crowd, brighter still when he turns to Johnny.

The club erupts in a cry of _Happy New Year!_ and couples, trios, quartets, _whatever_ throw themselves into one another’s arms for the first kisses of the year. The clubgoers kiss indiscriminately; they’re just happy to kiss and be kissed and to have lived another year.

And Kun is still in Johnny’s arms, looking up at him with those bright, bright eyes.

Johnny opens his mouth—probably to say something stupid—when Kun gets two fistfuls of his shirt and pulls himself up to kiss him, hard and hot and a little wild, the same way Johnny feels. 

“Told you I wouldn’t disappear at midnight,” he giggles into Johnny’s mouth, licking his way back in before Johnny can even make his neurons fire to come up with a response.

What Johnny wants to do to Kun isn’t decent for a dance floor. “Mm,” he mumbles intelligently, pulling Kun flush against his body with the hands still holding his hips. He savors the feeling for a moment before pulling away and tugging Kun by the wrist towards the back of the club.

They scarcely turn the corner into the isolated emergency exit hall before pushing Kun up against the wall and moving in close to kiss him absolutely senseless. His knee pries Kun’s legs apart to wedge his own thigh in between while his hands skim over Kun’s sides, waist, hips. He wants to touch it _all,_ he wants all of Kun. He hardly knows where to start.

Well. A wise man once said to start with what you know.

Johnny kisses Kun, breathes, “Happy birthday,” against his lips, and smiles when Kun sighs, high and needy, and pulls him back in with both hands cupping either side of his skull just beyond his ears. The heels of Kun’s palms fit just right in the hollows behind the bolts of his jaw. He could kiss Kun like this all night. He wants to.

Kun has other plans. “You— you should take me home,” he pants, dragging his lips artlessly across Johnny’s cheek when he pulls away and Johnny ducks his head to give the line of Kun’s neck the attention it deserves. “Call a Lyft.”

“Fast,” Johnny comments, nipping at the skin at the edge of the collar of Kun’s dress shirt. He wants to figure out what the skin of Kun’s shoulder feels like under his lips.

“Shut up.” One of the hands on the back of his head yanks at his hair playfully. “You’re one to talk, Mr Do-You-Wanna-Get-Out-Of-Here. Honestly, do you think this is a PornHub search result?”

Johnny digs his fingers into Kun’s hips again, uses his grip to rock him forward onto Johnny’s thigh and feels the way Kun loses his breath in goosebumps that raise on the back of his neck. “Nah, no PornHub video is this high quality.” He trails his nose up the curve of Kun’s neck, breathing in the way his cologne smells mixed with the sweat from the dance floor. “You’re like— expensive, high-art porn.”

Kun snorts in his ear. “I gotta say, no one’s ever tried to get in my pants by calling me _porn_ before.”

He pulls back to show Kun his grin. “I said _high-art_ porn. You’re classy.”

“At least I’m classy.”

On the other side of the wall, the music transitions into yet another 80s-pop-cum-EDM remix. Kun’s fingers twirl a lock of Johnny’s hair at the back of his head. His eyelashes are wicked long in the red light over the emergency exit. 

“Come home with me,” Johnny says, low, low, from the bottom of his chest, from somewhere more vulnerable than it has any right to be.

Those wicked long eyelashes flutter. “Okay.”

* * *

The Lyft ride has to be God’s divine punishment for homosexuality.

By that, Johnny means that it’s _long_. The streets are packed, half with drunk revelers and half with vehicles attempting to transport drunk revelers from one side of the city to the other.

Johnny and Kun slide into the backseat together and after about fifteen minutes of bumper-to-bumper, Kun unbuckles his seatbelt and slides across the bench to press himself along Johnny’s side. 

“Hi,” he murmurs, putting one hand on Johnny’s thigh and _kneading_ it. The word smells like honey and whiskey.

Johnny gets a glimpse into the future and sees his Lyft rating plummet. “Hey,” he replies, hoarse from the alcohol, and the smoke and sweat of the club, and shouting over the music and, yes, a little bit from, like, five consecutive hours of running horny.exe in the background.

Kun pushes his nose into Johnny’s hair just above his ear and whispers, “I’ve been thinking about sucking you off since you took your jacket off in my car.” His hand travels farther up Johnny’s thigh. The pads of his fingers continue to work at the muscles. It’s doing dangerous things to Johnny’s common sense.

He puts his hand on top of Kun’s before he can do something truly frightening like gain access to Johnny’s zipper. “Hm,” he hums, purposefully adding an absent-minded lilt to his tone. “I’ve got you beat.” When Kun frowns at him, confused, he adds, “I was thinking about sucking you off before I even knew your name.”

The smile that spreads across Kun’s face is too gleeful, really, for the borderline foreplay they’re doing right now. It almost looks childish; in that moment, it’s easy for Johnny to imagine Kun at five years old, blowing out the candles on his birthday cake. “Fast,” Kun giggles. “Who’s fast now?”

Well, Johnny absolutely _has_ to kiss him for that. He’s only human.

Their Lyft driver clears his throat in the front seat and they break apart. Kun giggles again but takes his hand back. The peace only lasts for about half a minute before Kun’s hand finds its way back to Johnny’s thigh, fingers innocently (read: diabolically) tracing back and forth along the inseam of his slacks.

Johnny stares at his Lyft app and subdivides the minutes remaining in their ride into seconds. 

(And if he lets his legs fall open, just a little bit… once again, he’s only human.)

* * *

They hit the door of Johnny’s apartment and it’s barely shut behind them before he goes to work on the stalwart few buttons still holding Kun’s shirt closed. He hears Kun laugh at him but can’t find the presence of mind to be embarrassed about his eagerness when Kun’s been deliberately doing everything short of feeling him up for the past half hour.

“Stop,” he giggles, pushing at Johnny’s chest to keep him from pinning Kun against the door. “Oh my god, you’re so horny. Let me take my shoes off, at least.”

Johnny steps back, but only because he’s successfully wrestled open the last button on Kun’s shirt and stepping back allows him to _look_ , to admire the way the shirt hangs open and frames Kun’s stomach in twin pillarboxes of white. One half of the shirt slips off his shoulder and hangs at the crook of his elbow as Kun leans down to pry one of his shoes off his heel. The light coming in through the window over the sink highlights his profile so Johnny can see where his skin curves over the defined muscles of his shoulder, his arm, even a sliver of his back.

“Fuck, I can’t fucking see for shit,” Kun grumbles, hopping on one foot to keep his balance. The light over the stove is closest, so Johnny fumbles his way over by memory and hits the switch with one hand and— fuck, if he thought Kun looked good silhouetted in the shitty halogen light from outside his door it’s nothing compared to how he looks in the low, warm cast of the single bulb. Kun straightens up to kick his shoe free and Johnny’s mouth goes dry at the sight of the subtle lines of his abs, the shadow of the strip of hair under his navel.

Fuck. Johnny’s going to _eat_ him.

He crosses his tiny kitchen in two steps and grabs Kun’s wrist, slips his hand down to twine their fingers as he dips his head to kiss him long and sweet and heavy and slow. It’s too romantic for what they are, for what they’re doing, but Kun doesn’t call him on it. 

Kun maneuvers around the hand Johnny’s slipped beneath his shirt to pull at Johnny’s shirt near his waistband, trying to untuck it. He tucks his next words in the spaces between kisses, between pulling at Johnny’s stinging, chapped lips with his teeth and licking into his mouth like an apology: “Take me to your bed, sweetie.”

Johnny _whines_ , straight up _whines_ , because, like, who says stuff like that in real life? Kun’s not making a very good case against _not_ being expensive, high-art porn. “Yeah,” he mumbles. Still, it takes a moment more before he finds the wherewithal to pull himself away from the warmth of the skin stretched across Kun’s ribs.

Fortunately, it’s a short trip, maybe twenty feet max from the front door to the bedroom door, only pausing once on the way to turn his heat back on so the cold doesn’t kill their post-coital afterglow.

Fuck, he hopes there’s an afterglow.

Finally, finally, they make it within reaching distance of the bed. Kun promptly tugs Johnny back into a hard kiss, setting back to work on divesting him of his shirt. He stops halfway, impatient, and slips his hands underneath the fabric as soon as he gets a corner of the shirt free of Johnny’s waistband.

Johnny sucks a breath in between his teeth. “Fuck, your hands are _cold_ , dude.”

“So are yours,” Kun retorts. His icy fingertips are unrelenting in their path across Johnny’s skin; his stomach muscles jump involuntarily as they dance across his belly. “You don’t hear me bitching.” One hand reaches higher. Johnny full-body twitches when Kun tweaks one of his nipples. “Take this off. Wanna see you, been waiting all fucking night to see you.”

Breathless, dizzy, Johnny takes half a step back to obey. The moment he pulls the dress shirt over his head, Kun is there again, pressing their chests together, leaving a trail of open-mouthed kisses across Johnny’s collarbone and up and over his shoulder, tracing the column of his spine with one hand.

“Gonna fuck you silly,” Kun promises. “Okay?”

Johnny groans. “Yeah,” he says again. Apparently that’s the extent of his vocab now.

His hands follow Kun’s lead as best they can with the primary goal of _getting Kun as naked as possible as quickly as possible_ , pushing at the shoulders of Kun’s shirt until it puddles around their feet, loosening his belt (with a brief detour on the way to finally taste the smooth, sweat-salted skin of Kun’s shoulder, his clavicle, the metal tang of the necklace’s chain), trying in vain to shove his pants down with one hand only to be gently slapped away so Kun can do it himself.

“Get on the bed,” he orders, punctuating the command with a quick kiss. “Where’s your—?”

Johnny sits on the edge of the mattress. His brain kinda feels like the neurological equivalent of a computer’s blue screen of death. “Uh,” he says intelligently. Where’s his…?

“Your lube, baby. Your condoms. Gotta get you ready for me.”

A breath punches out of his chest. _Fuck_. “The— the bottom drawer,” he manages, waving in the general direction of the nightstand.

Kun finishes shedding his tricky slacks and leans down, cupping the back of Johnny’s neck to kiss him sweetly. “Take your shorts off and lay down. I’ll be right there,” he murmurs.

Johnny falls back onto the bed (some part of his brain that isn’t cloaked in a horny fog notices that it’s unmade and is embarrassed. Yet another part of Johnny’s brain thinks it’s a bizarre thing to get bashful over when he’s about to take it up the ass from a man he met six hours ago) and stares up at his ceiling, taking measured breaths to recenter himself.

The lamp clicks on. His ears catch the sound of the drawer sliding open and gentle rustling as Kun picks through the contents for what they need. It reminds him to take his underwear off and he does so, wiggling ungracefully on the rumpled sheets to scooch them down his legs and off his ankles.

“Oh,” Kun sing-songs from the bedside. “Your toy is so pretty.”

Johnny’s ears flush hot and he closes his eyes to muster his courage. “You— We can use it, if you want.”

“Mm. Tempting.” The mattress dips and he opens his eyes to see Kun crawling over to bracket Johnny between his hands and knees. “But tonight I kinda want you to myself.”

From this angle, Johnny can see Kun’s dick starting to get heavy in his boxer briefs. He hooks two fingers in his waistband and lets them hang there, tugging at the elastic like a tease. “Selfish.”

Kun grins. “You get fucked either way, don’t you?”

Yeah, fucked is _exactly_ what Johnny’s feeling right now. “Would rather have you,” he mumbles, reaching past Kun’s waistband to shape his cock. “Can’t suck off a dildo.”

Kun laughs but it’s high and breathy, which Johnny takes as a reassuring sign that he’s not the only one feeling oddly intense. “You can,” he says. The words stutter out on huffs of breath that are almost adorably synchronised to the twists of Johnny’s fist as he starts to jack Kun off in tight, slow strokes, still restricted by the confines of his underwear. “Less of a chance of it accidentally gagging you, probably.”

“Kun.”

“Yeah?”

Johnny pulls Kun’s boxer briefs down and out of his way. “Shut up.”

When he and Kun fuck it’s like bells and trumpets; it’s like fireworks; like confetti falling on Times Square; like rednecks shooting at the moon.

Kun holds him in his lap with one hand crossing over Johnny’s chest to cover his heart and the other keeping time on Johnny’s cock with the rhythm of his own hips. Johnny bites his lip to smother his whimpering and reaches up to cling to the back of Kun’s neck by the tips of his fingers while the other drops to cup Kun’s ass, spurring him on as best he can.

“Look at you,” Kun purrs, _purrs_ into his ear. Johnny pries his eyes open, forces himself to make eye contact with himself in the mirror that hangs on the back of the door. “You look so pretty on my cock, baby.”

And, okay, Johnny has a reputation for being vain but it’s not just _vanity_ that makes him flush even hotter at the sight of his chest, blushed pink in the low lamplight; his hair curling at the ends from sweat; his core flexing to keep balance; his thighs shaking, forced outwards by Kun’s knees inside his own; and over his shoulder, Kun’s face turned in towards his as he maneuvers Johnny in his lap; the pretty, sweat-tangled hair hanging over his forehead; his lips—fucking _lovely_ lips—open and red and swollen and mouthing wet kisses over Johnny’s neck.

It’s… too intimate for sex with a stranger. This is, like, emotional, loving, can’t-wait-to-fuck-you-for-another-year anniversary sex. 

Not for the first time, Johnny thinks he may be in over his head.

“Kun,” he gasps, muscles shaking as he instinctively tries to meet the roll of Kun’s hips. “Kun.”

“Yeah, baby.” Kun’s voice is low and rough and _right in his ear_ , so much closer than Johnny expected that his head spins.

He squeezes his eyes shut. His nerve endings feel like pop rocks, all lit up and crackly. “Close, ’m close.”

“Me too. Want you to come first, though.” His lips flatten into a line against Johnny’s jugular. “How— how d’you like to…?”

“Mm.” Johnny cranes his head to kiss Kun. It’s sloppy, poorly aimed, but he _needs_ it, needs the grounding effect it has on his hazy brain. The points of his body that aren’t his dick and his asshole tune back into focus. He and Kun stick together with sweat everywhere they touch, fusing Johnny’s back to Kun’s front in a searing hot line of skin. Johnny knows better, logically, but it almost feels like they couldn’t separate even if they tried—even if they wanted to. He forces himself to take a deep breath. It shudders in his chest. “Like this.”

“Yeah. Wanna watch you watch yourself.” Kun bumps their noses together, adjusts, and kisses Johnny again. “Can I… inside?”

Johnny groans, gut twisting at the thought. “Wish you could without a condom.”

Kun doesn’t respond, but his rhythm stutters inside of Johnny, going irregular for a few strokes before setting a faster, more brutal tempo. His hand speeds up to match but it’s just _not quite enough_ so Johnny joins him, paying special attention to his head just the way he likes while Kun’s hand drops to rub at his base and his balls and— and—

“Keep your eyes open, angel,” Kun murmurs, correctly interpreting the (frankly mortifying) high-pitched noises that Johnny fails to bite back. His mouth is hot on the shell of Johnny’s ear. “Don’t want you to miss it.”

Johnny’s back arches forward when he comes, head lolling back against Kun’s shoulder, but Kun arches with him and lets go of Johnny’s cock to push his head up so he _has_ to look at himself in the mirror, _has_ to watch his stupid oh-face, _has_ to watch himself shoot all over his own belly and chest.

He also gets to see Kun turn his face into Johnny’s neck to muffle the broken noise he makes as his cock twitches inside Johnny’s ass.

Kun freezes when he starts coming but after a moment of a moment he keeps fucking him—albeit slower than before, and a little unsteady—until Johnny pulls at the wrist of the hand still supporting his chest and whines weakly. 

Still, they don’t move. 

The hand on the back of his head slips around Johnny’s stomach to keep him close. Johnny lets his head rest on Kun’s shoulder. Johnny’s heart pounds in the cage of Kun’s hand; its pulse rabbits where Kun’s lips rest against his throat. 

After a long moment, those lips move, sending goosebumps across Johnny’s still-hot skin.

“Can I stay?” they ask.

Johnny traces aimless figure eights on the back of Kun’s neck. “Was hoping you would,” he whispers.

Kun kisses whatever he can reach of Johnny’s throat, jaw, ear, cheek, equally aimless. “Wasn’t sure,” he murmurs. “Thought it might be too fast.”

Johnny laughs at that, just a huff that barely leaves his chest, because really, everything they’ve done has been _too fast_ but that hasn’t stopped them from doing it thus far.

Kun pulls out carefully and unfolds their legs, kissing behind the bolt of Johnny’s jaw every time he winces. He leaves Johnny laying on top of his messy sheets, body cooling rapidly under the ceiling fan (Johnny’s ceiling fan stays ON during sex, and always), and returns sans used condom with a glass of water and a warm, clean rag for Johnny. He hands him the water but when Johnny tries to reach for the rag, he holds it away. 

“Let me do this for you,” he insists. “I like doing this.”

And, well—what can Johnny say to that? Especially when Kun can’t seem to clean him up without pausing every few swipes to kiss him, more tender than he has any right to be.

He falls asleep with Kun pressed in a warm, solid line against his back. He wakes up alone.

It takes him a moment to figure out why that feels _wrong_. After all, Johnny wakes up alone more often than not. It’s only when he sees the glass of water and the lube on the bedside table that he remembers— _Kun_.

He rolls onto his back, gritting his teeth when his muscles protest. Really, Johnny shouldn’t be surprised. Hookups don’t _stay the night_ , especially not magical New Year’s Eve genies. _Take the orgasm and move on_ , he tells himself, staring at the blank ceiling in defiance of the hollow gap yawning behind his sternum.

After a few minutes of internal pep talk, he convinces himself to get out of bed (hastened in no small part by the realisation that he’s rolled over right into a sticky spot on the sheets). On his way to the bathroom, he catches sight of himself in the mirror and cringes at the uneven red marks littered across the right side of his neck. Some of those fuckers are _high_ , like almost at his _ears._ He’ll never be able to hide those.

_God_ , he thinks bitterly. _If you’re gonna smash and pass, at least have the decency not to turn me into a fucking stop sign._

Whatever. It’s karma, probably. He can’t think of what it could be for now but he’ll surely come up with something after he’s pissed and had his first cup of coffee.

He does half that—the pissing half—and shoves his legs into some sweatpants before wandering out of his room to put on the hoodie he knows he left on the couch.

Immediately, he sucks in a breath because _fuck_ , fucking _cold_ , and then his heart falls into his ass at the sight of his balcony door cracked open. A quick glance around reassures him that he hasn’t been robbed—or, if he was robbed, they neglected to steal his TV and his laptop and all of his cameras—and his apartment is too small to effectively hide any crazy ax murderers, so he shuffles over to the door and pokes his head out. 

It’s the best kind of deja vu to see Kun leaning against his balcony railing with a cigarette in hand; best because Kun is in _Johnny’s_ boxers and the hoodie he left on the couch, best because his hair still kinda looks like they just finished having sex, best because Kun is still _here_. He didn’t leave. He didn’t disappear like a magical genie.

Johnny allows himself a few more moments just to _watch_ before his greed takes over and he pads outside, cold be damned, and drapes himself against Kun’s back, arms wrapping around his stomach to hide his hands from the biting wind in the hoodie’s kangaroo pouch.

“Good morning,” he sighs, pressing his nose against Kun’s temple in lieu of a kiss.

Kun takes a short drag off his cig, blows the exhale at an angle so the wind will carry it away from Johnny’s face. “Hey. Sorry, did I wake you?”

“No.”Johnny thinks, _Fuck it_ , and kisses Kun’s cheek. “Thought you’d left.”

Kun doesn’t respond beyond taking another pull off his smoke. They stand together in the quiet of the morning, looking out off the balcony. Across the street, a Dunkin Donuts employee hauls a trashbag twice her size to the dumpster.

Johnny shivers against Kun’s back—he’s still shirtless, after all—and Kun reaches into his kangaroo pocket and pulls one of Johnny’s hands under the hoodie to press it against his stomach. His skin is warm, searing hot compared to the crisp winter air, and Johnny shivers for an entirely new reason. 

“I’ll make coffee,” he murmurs, trailing his cold nose against Kun’s neck. “Do you drink coffee?”

Kun hums in affirmation, tamping out his cigarette butt on the rail and flicking it into the empty flower pot collecting rainwater in the corner of the balcony. Johnny can see two other butts swimming there in the half-frozen slush. Before he can read subtext into _that_ , Kun turns in the circle of his arms and threads his clean fingers through Johnny’s hair to pull him into one of those sweet, smoky kisses of his. 

He pulls back before Johnny’s ready, an odd half-smile-half-frown tugging at the corner of his mouth. “We should probably shower,” he comments. “I think there’s cum in your hair.”

“What?” One hand reflexively leaves the warmth of the hoodie to touch the back of his head and—fuck—sure enough, a little patch of his hair has dried into tacky spikes. “Oh, _gross_ ,” he complains, scratching at the mess with his nails.

Kun laughs, not unkindly, and pulls Johnny’s hand away, distracting him with a peck on the lips. “I’ll wash it for you,” he promises, eyes shining.

Johnny stares back at him, thinks about how Kun is holding the hand he was just using to pick at old jizz and looking at him with stars in his eyes and promising to wash his hair, and feels really, really, really overwhelmed. 

“I thought you left,” he repeats.

The hand holding his squeezes once, twice, three times. “I didn’t,” Kun whispers back.

“I don’t want you to.” _Maybe ever,_ Johnny doesn’t add, because that would be fucking _crazy._ It’d be fucking crazy to be in love with a man he met twelve hours ago.

It’d be fucking—

Kun’s other hand rests on Johnny’s chest, a gentle echo of its placement the night before. “I’ll stay as long as you want me.”

Johnny’s heart catches in his throat. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” he says. It’s supposed to be a joke but it comes out half-choked and far too serious.

Kun smiles, warm like his skin under the hoodie; like the glow of a cigarette; like tipsy off cheap champagne; like bodies in a crowded club; warm like breath on the back of your neck as you fall asleep with someone you love.

“I don’t.”

* * *

_Dag tosses his cigarette and refocuses his hearing to the sounds of the party, faint over the gully. "Well, Andy. Wish me luck," he says, hopping down off of the cement pipe, then taking a few steps, stopping, turning around then saying to me, "Here, bend over to me a second."_

_I comply, whereupon he kisses me, triggering films in my mind of liquefied supermarket ceilings cascading upward toward heaven. "There. I've always wanted to do that."_

Douglas Coupland, _Generation X_

**Author's Note:**

> [twitter](https://www.twitter.com/kittyong/)   
>  [curiouscat](https://www.curiouscat.me/teddykun)   
> 


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